LA Weekly

In January 2005, Olga Petrakova walked into the theater that her co–artistic director, Brad Ashten, had constructed in the rented, empty cinder-block garage of a former ’40s gas station on Santa Monica Boulevard. What she saw when she walked past the lobby shocked her. Their theater had been dismantled and meticulously stored in the middle of the space — planks and lighting instruments and cables, all neatly stacked. In a pique, Ashten had destroyed the house he built.

And though she was dismayed to see what her partner had done, it wasn’t the first time she’d seen a home of sorts dismantled. She left Russia on August 1, 1991, two weeks before the coup that foreshadowed the end of the Soviet Union on New Year’s Eve of that year.

“I felt I’d just fled a collapsing house. But I had such a sense of loss because, I know this sounds strange, but there was something quite precious about actually having a Soviet Union. The first couple of years I went back, there were such rapid changes, but the mentality of people didn’t change. The commercial side just ran away with the country.”

After wading through the rubble of the defunct Soviet empire, and a failed theater enterprise or two in Los Angeles, Petrakova has been searching for a workable balance between her own ideals for an ensemble theater — the kind of collective that the early Soviets talked about for their society — and the means to pay for it.


Born in the Moldavian Republic to Russian parents in 1971, Petrakova was educated in Leningrad at what’s now St. Petersburg State University. In Russia, she was attracted to Eastern philosophy and transcendental meditation. At the university, she completed an eight-year program in applied mathematics and dance. But never acting, she says. “In Russia, actors are gods; you become an actor through lineage, through family and family connections. I didn’t have any. I would have been wasting my time.”

She left Russia at age 20 because she’d been accepted at Iowa’s Maharishi International University, where she studied dance but, thinking practically, received a master’s degree in business administration. In Iowa, she also finally took acting classes, which followed Sanford Meisner’s famously American interpretation of the Russian Konstantin Stanislavsky’s acting “method” that employs improvisation in order to arrive at inner truths.

“All that was dormant in me started to explode,” Petrakova says. “Everything else became clearer. After seven years in Iowa, and visiting New York every year, I decided to move there. New York was very brutal. People on the subway were rude. The waiters were rude. I saw Cats and hated it. It was just not my trip. Everything that could have, went wrong. I auditioned at the Neighborhood Playhouse [where Meisner developed his technique] and left New York not knowing if I’d been accepted. When I got back to Iowa, the invitation from Neighborhood Playhouse came in the mail, but the company I was working for had sent me to L.A.”

Here, things fell into place for her, Petrakova says, including a free place to live because of a job caring for a disabled man. And while slogging through head shots and finding an agent, Petrakova made a few films under the name Istelle Petra. “It wasn’t very fulfilling,” she says. “I felt that artistically and creatively, this isn’t what I wanted to be doing. The idea of exploring Russian theater was much more fulfilling.”

In early 2004, Petrakova met Brad Ashten, a young man from Houston who’d been directing Shakespeare in parks and knew his way around lumber, a drill and a band saw. With the landlord’s approval, Ashten helped build two versions of a theater in the abandoned garage: one in the summer, and then an improved and more elaborate variation in December. Meanwhile, the pair formed a joint enterprise, TheatRevolution — a combination of their respective ventures: Petrakova’s ART Players (ART being an acronym for American Russian Theatre) and Ashten’s INDEPENDant Players.

It was during this time that Petrakova was starting to feel heat from the landlord, Eugene LaPietra — decadeslong owner of Circus dance club, just down the boulevard, and leader of a failed but interesting campaign to incorporate Hollywood as a city. LaPietra told the Weekly he was “charmed by these kids and the seriousness of their commitment to create art,” which would explain the generosity of his month-to-month agreement for a rent amounting to whatever sum “the kids” brought in at their box office. Problem was, explains Petrakova, the theater needed a longer lease for its stability, and those box-office receipts were a laughable fraction of the market-rent value.

Furthermore, LaPietra was now talking about minimum payments, and, with an MBA in her pocket, Petrakova was seeing the practical needs for sustaining their theater. She believed that guest shows would pay LaPietra a market-value rent, and allow her and Ashten to stop abusing his generosity.

She and Ashten fell into a seething dispute over whether or not to subrent the space for “showcases,” as Ashten would derisively describe them. He feared they would harm the reputation of TheatRevolution.

Also at the time, LaPietra was considering converting the entire premises into a parking lot. Petrakova remembers her horror at seeing demolition trucks outside the theater in mid-2004. Nothing actually happened, and after a few fund-raisers in the parking lot, the trucks stopped coming.

“Brad was hoping that his productions would pay the rent,” Petrakova explains, “and he was adamant about not having the space rented to other companies. We can’t afford such a philosophy right now, I said. Rental shows will pay for it. I don’t think our space will be associated with showcases. We need a new partner, I said. He was getting aggressive; our communication went down to nothing. I asked him how I could buy him out. His response was to destroy the theater.”